MONTREAL — On Monday, the one-year anniversary of the Quebec City mosque attack that killed six worshippers, the province’s largest labour federation posted a simple message of commemoration on its Facebook page. “Today we remember and say no to hate,” it wrote above a photo of a candlelight vigil.

It seemed innocuous, but it sparked a deluge of replies unlike anything the Fédération des travailleurs du Québec’s social-media manager had seen before. The Muslim victims had got what they deserved, one commenter wrote. They had failed to integrate and adopt Quebec customs, another wrote. Another attacked Islam as a sexist religion responsible for thousands of deaths.

“Yesterday was a particularly sad day on the FTQ Facebook page,” the federation wrote in a follow-up message, lamenting the fact that “a large number of hateful people” had chosen to sully the memory of the victims.

“We had to delete a significant number of hateful and violent comments. Have we come to this point in Quebec?”

In the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 29, 2017 massacre, it was expected the event would provoke a moment of reckoning in Quebec, a message to leaders and commentators that it was dangerous to constantly put the religious practices of one minority under the microscope. “Words matter … Words can hurt. Words can be knives slashing at people’s consciousness,” Premier Philippe Couillard said two days after the killings.

A year later, however, the FTQ is not alone in asking what progress Quebec has made. While the anniversary prompted an outpouring of sympathy from many, it was tempered by defensiveness — if not outright hostility — from others.

Polling by Léger for the Association for Canadian Studies found that Quebecer’s attitudes toward Muslims improved dramatically immediately after the massacre. In March 2017, 50 per cent of Quebecers said they had a positive view of Muslims, compared with 42 per cent who held negative views. By December, the trend had reversed, with 48 per cent replying positive and 43 per cent negative. (Nationally, 57 per cent of respondents held positive views of Muslims and 32 per cent negative.)

Boufeldja Benabdallah, co-founder and vice-president of the Islamic Cultural Centre where the six men were killed, said the anniversary has stirred a mix of emotions in the city’s Muslim community. “Over the past year, we have felt empathy from people, but at the same time there is a very disappointing, very dangerous trend — an increase in insults, threats, etc.

“It comes from a minority that has the loudest voice.”

He was referring to anti-Muslim extremist groups that have become more visible and more vocal in Quebec in the year since the massacre. In a speech to the crowd gathered at Monday’s Quebec City memorial, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau singled out one of those groups, La Meute, or the wolf pack. Trudeau ridiculed the group’s members as racist “bozos who walk around with a dog’s paw on their T-shirt.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, middle left to right, Quebec City mayor Regis Labeaume and Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard at a vigil to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the mosque shooting in Quebec City, Jan. 29, 2018.Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press

But instead of putting La Meute in its place, Trudeau himself came under attack for invoking the far right. Conservative MP Pierre Paul-Hus, who represents a Quebec City riding, said the remarks were disrespectful and unbecoming of a prime minister. “Why did he feel the need to speak about these people?” Paul-Hus asked. Fellow Quebec City Conservative MP Gérard Deltell accused Trudeau of playing politics. “Monday night wasn’t the time,” he said. Bloc Québécois leader Martine Ouellet said Trudeau used Monday’s ceremony to cast blame on Quebecers. “An isolated act is in no way representative of what is happening in Quebec society,” she said.

La Meute spokesman Sylvain Brouillette made the rounds of Quebec City media, expressing his displeasure with Trudeau and defending La Meute’s members as people who stick up for Quebec values and heritage. Brouillette got an unanticipated assist from Pierre Karl Péladeau, the CEO of Québecor and former Parti Québécois leader. Péladeau, who has expressed an interest in returning to politics, wrote repeatedly on Twitter that Trudeau is the real “bozo.” It was a theme taken up by a cartoonist and columnist in Quebecor’s Journal de Québec newspaper. “Who’s a bozo, Mr. Trudeau?” read the headline over a Jan. 30 Sophie Durocher column. She took offense that Trudeau directed the “bozo” slur at “Canadian citizens who, barring evidence to the contrary, have committed no crimes.”

Trudeau’s speech addressed head-on a subject that many provincial politicians had been tiptoeing around: Islamophobia. “We are all afraid sometimes. We are afraid of the unknown. We are afraid of the foreigner,” he said. “We have to rise above that, my friends. We have to recognize our own weaknesses, our own fears. We cannot pretend that it doesn’t exist.”

But the existence of Islamophobia had in fact been a topic of intense debate.

It's very hard to address it when you're turning the victims of the prejudice into people who are somehow engaged in victimization of the majority population

At the beginning of January, national Muslim groups, including the Quebec City Islamic Cultural Centre, wrote to Trudeau asking his government to designate Jan. 29 as a national day of remembrance and action on Islamophobia.

“With the rise of far-right extremist groups that continue to threaten the safety of Canadian Muslim institutions and congregations, it is critical that our elected leaders stand firmly against Islamophobia and the agents of bigotry who aim to foment hateful division between Canadians and their fellow Muslim citizens,” they wrote. “We must not allow voices of hate, even ones that may initially appear to be on the margins, to permeate our public discourse and damage our social fabric.”

In Quebec, the request was a red flag waved in front of politicians. “If they want to fight against Islamophobia, that means they think Quebecers are Islamophobic, and we don’t agree with that,” said Eric Caire of the opposition Coalition Avenir Québec, which currently leads in opinion polls. The PQ’s Agnès Maltais said Islamophobia is a “loaded” word. “I think we have debated enough the divisions around the presence of religion in Quebec,” she told Le Devoir. Liberal Premier Philippe Couillard hesitated but eventually came out against the idea, saying he did not want to single out one form of racism.

There had also been a backlash from the mother of a Quebec City woman whose daughter was among six Quebecers killed in 2016 by Islamist jihadis in Burkina Faso. They had been in the African nation doing humanitarian work. “I am part of a family who lost six people that we loved and appreciated and who were killed by Islamists,” Camille Carrier wrote in a January Facebook post opposing the idea of an annual day commemorating the mosque victims. “Other Quebecers died right here. And nobody here asked for a day commemorating these events,” she wrote, as reported in the Journal de Québec.

When the city last month announced its plans to mark the Jan. 29 anniversary, it said it would be commissioning two works of public art – one in memory of the mosque victims and another in honour of the people killed in Burkina Faso.

People place flowers during a vigil to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Quebec City mosque shooting, in Quebec City, Jan. 29, 2018.Jacques Boissinot/The Canadian Press

Benabdallah said the debate was evidence that a year after the killings of Mamadou Tanou Barry, Ibrahima Barry, Khaled Belkacemi, Abdelkrim Hassane, Azzeddine Soufiane and Aboubaker Thabti, political considerations remain paramount.

“If they had used this time of commemoration to stand together, they would have elevated the debate, and people would have seen politicians rallying together because they want a better future for the country rather than dividing it,” he said.

Maybe, he acknowledged, the proposal could have been improved. “But instead they reject it, and say, ‘These Muslims want to have their day because they are calling us all Islamophobes.’ ”

Jack Jedwab, president of the Association for Canadian Studies, said Quebec’s eternal debate over restricting religious symbols – as seen last year with legislation banning niqab-wearing women from receiving public services – contributes to negative sentiment toward Muslims.

He said it is “bizarre” how the tables have been turned against a community that suffered an unprecedented attack last year and continues to suffer prejudice. “There’s this view that, ‘We’re the victims of this debate about Islamophobia because it’s targeting us, the majority, as the ones who are holding such sentiments,’ ” he said. “It’s very hard to address it when you’re turning the victims of the prejudice into people who are somehow engaged in victimization of the majority population.”